Category: General

Justice Everywhere is back for a new season. We continue in our aim to provide a public forum for the exchange of ideas about philosophy and public affairs.

We have lots of exciting content coming your way! This includes:

• Weekly posts from our a wonderful team of house authors, offering analysis of a vast array of moral, ethical, and political issues on Mondays.
• The continuation of our collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy, introducing readers to cutting-edge research being published on justice-related topics in applied and engaged philosophy.
• More from our special series: Beyond the Ivory Tower where we interview those who work at/across the boundary between theory and practice, and Teaching Philosophy.
• In addition, we will have a number of special one-off series planned this season. First of all, coming up later this semester, a series of essays based on talks presented during the 2023 “What Good is Philosophy” conference, a benefit conference for the Ukrainian Academy.

If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to contribute a guest post on a topical subject in political philosophy (broadly construed), or would like to pitch a series or collaboration – such as publishing a series based on a workshop or special issue – please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

So please follow us, read and share posts on social media (we’re on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Twitter), and feel free to comment on posts using the comment box at the bottom of each post.

With about half of the world’s population living in countries that have held or will hold nationwide elections this year, 2024 has been called a “super election year”, and the “biggest election year in history”. In the past two weeks alone, elections were held in all 27 EU countries (with some also holding local or parliamentary elections aside from those for the European Parliament), as well as in India, Mexico, South Africa, Madagascar, Iceland, or Serbia, with others scheduled in the second half of this year, most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, extensive empirical analyses show that in the last five decades electoral participation rates have gradually but consistently declined, with averages of about 10% lower turnout in the 2010s than in the 1960s. One possible solution to this problem, especially advocated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and currently implemented in about a quarter of EU countries as well as most US states, the UK, Iceland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, and others, is to allow all citizens the option of not voting in-person at the polling station on the day of the election, but to cast a ballot beforehand via postal voting or, less widespread, through e-voting systems. While such mechanisms – often labelled remote or convenience voting – are often praised, I will attempt to sketch some countervailing reasons that we should, I believe, consider when assessing their overall desirability.